1956

Andersonville

By MacKinlay Kantor

Original Publisher: World Publishing Company

Current Publisher: Plume

Fiction Finalists That Year:

• Paul Bowles for The Spider’s House
• Shirley Ann Grau for The Black Prince
• MacKinlay Kantor for Andersonville
• Flannery O'Connor for A Good Man Is Hard to Find
• May Sarton for Faithful Are the Wounds
• Robert Penn Warren for Band of Angels
• Eudora Welty for The Bride of the Innisfallen
• Herman Wouk for Marjorie Morningstar

Fiction Winner That Year: John O’Hara for Ten North Frederick

Fiction Judges That Year: Carlos Baker, John Brooks, Granville Hicks, Saunders Redding, Mark Schorer

The Year in Literature:

• Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
• Juan Ramón Jiménez won the Nobel Prize for literature.

More Information:

• Kantor was born Benjamin McKinlay Kantor but started going by his middle name when he was a child. He added an “a” to its spelling because he thought it sounded more Scottish.
• The Academy Award-winning film “The Best Years of Our Lives” is based on Kantor’s 1945 novel Glory for Me. Kantor was disappointed that the film was released under a different title and that details of the story were changed by the screenwriter Robert Sherwood.